Settings to fill an open container with objects
You can use rigid body physics to do this, make sure of the following:

All modifiers that you want to affect the simulation are applied

The jar has thickness

The jar is set to Mesh collision type to allow objects inside of it

You may also want to enable Split impulse in Scene &gt; Rigid body world to prevent intersecting objects flying apart at high speed.


To arrange the thimble objects above the jar you could use the Randomize Transform tool (Space&gt; Randomize Transform)
Once you have simulated the objects falling into the container and you want to remove the physics but keep the location/rotation for a specific frame, you can do this by:

Select the objects you want to bake into posistion

Press Bake to keyframes in 3D view &gt; Tool shelf (N) &gt; Rigid body tools and set the Start and End frames to the frame you want to keep:


Press OK. This will remove the rigid body physics settings from all selected objects, and add a single keyframe on the specified frame.

You can then remove this keyframe (AltI).


Result: